


Midwinter Queen

by fajrdrako



Category: The Lion in Winter (1968)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 18:58:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13037382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fajrdrako/pseuds/fajrdrako
Summary: Christmas at Chinon, 1183. Conversation gambits keep the Christmas fires burning.





	Midwinter Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> With thanks to PFL for beta-reading.

Midwinter Queen

The bow bent; sprang loose as the archer released the bowstring. The arrow hit centre target. It quivered for a moment in the circle of straw and cloth set up for practice. The morning solstice light glistened on the shaft.

Eleanor, Queen of England, frowned. She took another arrow from the quiver by her foot, and shot again. It hit the target slightly to the left of the first shot. She had hoped for better. She muttered a French curse.

The third arrow flew straight, fast, fluid. Much better.

She notched a fourth arrow, and pulled the string, but not to shoot at the ice-flecked straw. She whirled on her left foot to aim with absolute accuracy between the eyes of her watching husband.

He smiled, oblivious to danger, damn him. “I used to be able to sneak up on you.”

“I used to let you.” She did not move the bow, or the arrow, or the well-aimed arrowhead.

This was the warm, intelligent smile she remembered well on the young Henry she had once known, when life was simple and full of hope. In those days when he looked like a solution to a problem, rather than a dangerous trap. When she had a crown she wanted rid of and he was looking for his own.

“But not now?”

Grimacing, she relaxed the bow and lowered it. “I would shoot you, but no one else understands my jokes.”

“I have a similar problem. Is that your bow? I gave orders you were not to be allowed weapons.”

“It’s John’s. He won’t mind. He’s still asleep.”

“So are all sane people. It’s early, it’s cold, and here you are, playing marksman in the courtyard.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Good God, who can? There are too many people in the castle, and every one of them plotting some sort of perfidy.”

“So says the spider-king. Why are you up? Awake or asleep, you could be all warm and cosy with Alais.” She managed to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Intonation was everything.

“Her feet were cold. Besides… I never could sleep when you were restless. You don’t need to be nearby for me to know. I’ll swear, you can be in Salisbury while I am in Poitou and I hear you, thinking as loud as a theologian, tromping about the battlements.”

“It keeps me fit.”

“It defies understanding, but I always know.”

“Too easy, Henry. I am always restless. You don’t need to have kingly powers of perception to know it.” In the growing Christmas dawn light, she could see frost on his breath, on his beard and hair. She wanted to smooth it with her hand, but he might possibly bite. “Do you think it’s old age?”

“Just lack of self-control. Or perhaps those nagging regrets?”

“Regrets? I have none. Do you?”

“You mean, besides Thomas?” The Archbishop who had betrayed him, first in life, then in death. Whose saintliness had been dangerous and deadly; whose charisma had been a noose for both the living and the dead.

“I mean, besides Rosamund,” she said tartly.

“Ah. No hurt there, my queen: you might as well bait Richard about his poetry. I have no regrets about Rosamund, no. She is one of many losses, and they blend together like folksongs. Shall we go inside and warm up?”

“Cold never used to bother you.”

“I used to be better at dissembling. Now I don’t bother.” He held out his arm to her. “Madame?”

She stood frozen in place, not giving him an inch. “I don’t believe you.”

“About the cold?”

“About the regrets.”

He shrugged, in that big furred coat that never seemed to fit him. He still dressed like a labourer, though sometimes he was a labourer in a crown. “I regret our son Henry’s death. He deserved time. He deserved a full life, with triumphs and offspring and a chance to rule.”

“You crowned him,” she said, “And kept him from power.”

“You think he was ready?”

“I think he deserved the chance to try.”

“And you’re making me freeze to death in revenge?”

“I could never make you do anything. Standing out here in the snow -- that’s my choice. If you don’t like it, go on. Go on, shoo. I don’t need you here.”

She got a full laugh at that. “You’re still magnificent. Maybe I’m standing out here, cold ears and all, because I like to talk to you. I understand your jokes, you understand my ambitions.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

They stared at each other for a moment: blue eyes facing blue eyes, bright and enigmatic. 

The king said, “Henry died seven months ago. I miss him every day.”

She showed neither sympathy nor weakness, not in front of her husband. “William died twenty-seven years ago. Do you miss him, too?” Their first-born, the springtime child from the early days of their marriage, when everything seemed possible.

He said very softly, as if she had asked for sympathy, “You know I do. And I miss our daughters, married and far away. Beautiful Joan in hot Sicily. Lovely Eleanor, spawning young Castilians. Matilda, fighting Saxony for Saxony like the warrior we taught her to be. I miss every one, just as I miss Richard when he is in Aquitaine and Geoffrey when he is in Brittany.”

“Miss them? Put you in the same room with them and you attack them like a battle-cock.”

“They fight me first.”

He had, perhaps, a point. She wondered whether he truly blamed her for that -- he had, once -- and decided not to ask. “They are so like you.”

“And you.”

Compliment? Insult? Both? She took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go in.”

“Cold now?”

“Hungry. There is breakfast laid out, I hope?”

“At your command.”

This time, she took his arm and they walked in tandem to the Great Keep of Chinon. Servants had lit lamps to warm and light the dim morning. Last night there had been feasting and festivity, the place alive with colour and motion and music, full to bursting with the family and their court. Now it seemed cavernous and empty, supernaturally calm. She shivered, colder indoors than she had been outdoors. Once she had ruled here. Now she was neither queen nor prisoner, but something suspended between the extremes. “The sea before the storm,” Eleanor murmured, without explaining. She sat in the large chair beside Henry’s, where numerous women had sat in her place; but they were not here at the moment. Servants were bringing ale, and bread, and sliced meats.

Henry dug in. Beside him, Eleanor ate in silence for a few moments. Servants served; two friends came to speak to her, but she did not encourage them to linger and talk. At a suitable moment, when no one was hovering over them, she said, “What is your ambition now, Henry?”

“Surviving this Christmas.”

“And beyond that?”

“Surviving St. Stephen’s Day.” The day after Christmas. 

“Do you think you’ll make it?”

“The odds are not with me. A dagger behind every door. A knife in every hand.” He glanced at the knife with which she was, at the moment, spreading jam on bread. “A son in possession of the legendary king’s sword Excalibur. A wife whose marksmanship is superb. No wonder I’m not relaxing.”

“You set the tone, with your Plantagenet ways. Death to all enemies! Why have you let me live? Why didn’t you kill me as soon as I became troublesome? It wouldn’t be the first killing in your family.”

He settled back in his beautiful carved chair, like a woodsman who has accidentally found his way into a palace and finds himself a bad fit. “My family prospered by killing - common enough among kings and would-be kings. My great grandfather killed half of England for the throne. My grandfather just killed his brother. My mother killed the half her grandfather missed, and I - I just killed my Chancellor. My Archbishop. My friend.” 

“Your lover,” she corrected.

“If he had loved me, he wouldn’t have left.” 

“Nonsense. We all hurt our lovers best. You should know. Thomas turned on you, but I brought an army against you. Why let me live? Sheer entertainment value?”

“Love,” he said. “The memory of love.”

“I don’t know what love is, any more,” she said. “A game? A trap? Is it real?”

“Isn’t it?”

There was a moment of silence while she considered the comment. A lifetime of silence. She said, “Everything changes.”

“Why should love be any different?”

She smiled wanly. “Are you the same man I once loved? The Plantagenet boy, all fire and fury?”

“Do I seem changed?”

“You got old. You got angry.”

“And you?”

“Sometimes I wish I could blow away on the wind.”

His hand covered hers on the table, as large and strong and warm as it had ever been. “You are the strongest woman I know. You always have been.”

She laughed at the incongruity. It was what she had always wanted: to be strong. After a moment, he laughed as well, and leaned to her, putting his fingers to her cheek. He kissed her - not a light peck, but not a lingering kiss, either. “My queen,” he said, “all these years, and you smell just as you always did.” He did not release her hand.

“I smell? As compliments go, that’s hardly the stuff of poetry.”

“It’s honesty,” he said. “At the end of it all, I find that’s all I have to give you.”

“Your honesty is a heavy thing. It drops like a brick. All I wanted was my freedom.”

“Impossible. No one is as unfree as a queen… or a king.”

With her free hand, she raised her mug of ale. “A toast to our chains, then.”

“To our chains.”

They drank the ale together.

_End_


End file.
